vocabulary: "what-if" in other languages, other words

[Tophe]

Dear Joe, what you said about the word counterfactual is interesting, while... this word may have a different meaning, sometimes or always I don't know. In French this is "contrafactualité" and I read in a book of Bernard d'Espagnat interesting things about it:
what is "being magnetic"? if you have iron dust it would orientate in this direction, but if you have not iron to show it, is it still magnetic? yes this is contrafactual definition: "if you have no iron, being magnetic means that if you would have iron, it would orientate this way"...
Scientific what-iffism, yes, maybe. Funny, thanks to remind me that lecture.

[elmayerle]

Others call it alternate histories or "Uchronic" stories.  There's a major website for this branch of science-fiction, Uchronia, http://www.uchronia.net/ , and I find it most interesting to browse on occasion.  *grin* You find some fascinating books there, too.

Tophe, I've also seen these alternate history stories called "counterfactual stories'.  The introduction on the Uchronia website, http://www.uchronia.net/intro.html ),  gives a good listing of the various names used for this sub-genre as well as good overview of the material out there.

[Tophe]

You are very right, El, and the word "what-if" clearly appears in the Uchronia introduction you gave ( http://www.uchronia.net/ ) while... I guess the what-if concept is richer than uchronia: a full rainbow of dreams and universes is available (what-if gravity could be locally disconnected? what-if mind-power was enough to propel an airplane?) and the uchronia question just add a little fake "historic" side (when would that have occured? and what would have been the true and unique History then?)...
This is fun also, but my feeling is that what-ifism is above uchronic "seriousness"...

[NARSES2]

As an aside the editor of the Uchronia website gets a copy of the WIF SIG Newsletter